Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Chinese Efl Learners' Anaphora Resolution And Reading Comprehension:An Empirical Study

This study is carried out to investigate the effects of textual enhancement(TE)on Chinese EFL learners' anaphora resolution and reading comprehension.Although TE has been one of the hottest topics in recent second language acquisition research,previous studies have consistently produced mixed results and few studies so far have systematically examined the effects of TE on learners' anaphora resolution.Therefore,the influence of TE still needs to be investigated.It is believed that successful anaphora resolution in reading is related to the explicitness of the antecedent-anaphor relation.It mirrors one purpose of TE,which is that it raises learners' awareness of linguistic forms by enhancing the input salience.Therefore,it is necessary for the researcher to choose anaphoric references as the target form to figure out the effects of TE.Based on the Input Hypothesis and the Noticing Hypothesis,the current study intends to explore the following questions: 1)What are the effects of TE on Chinese EFL learners' anaphora resolution? 2)What are the effects of TE on Chinese EFL learners' reading comprehension? 3)What is the relationship between Chinese EFL learners' anaphora resolution and reading comprehension? 102 senior three students in Shenzhen Luohu Foreign Middle School were randomly divided into a control group and a TE group.Three research instruments were employed in the study.First,a reading proficiency test was conducted to measure the participants' reading proficiency.Then,to assess the effects of TE on anaphora resolution,both groups completed the pre-and post-tests consisting of reference identification questions.To measure the effects of TE on L2 reading comprehension,the participants completed an 8-item multiple choice test with questions focusing on form or meaning from the reading passages.All the test scores were submitted to SPSS 21.0 to be analyzed through independent samples test or correlation analysis.The research results provide three major findings.First,TE promotes Chinese EFL learners' anaphora resolution,possibly because of their noticing and prior knowledge of the target form.Second,TE doesn't impede readers' meaning processing,but facilitates their reading comprehension.Third,supporting previous L1 anaphor studies,the current study suggests a positive correlation between anaphoraresolution and reading comprehension in L2 reading.Based on these findings,there are some pedagogical implications.First,L2 learners are encouraged to use both bottom-up and top-down reading strategies simultaneously for a more effective textual understanding.Second,in L2 anaphor teaching,content-based curricula in which both form and meaning are focused are more effective.Given limited time and participants,the current study has some limitations which should be taken into consideration for future research.First,a follow-up delayed post-test is needed to investigate long-term effects of TE on anaphor learning.Second,because the pretest and post-test focused on the same target form and used the same type of reference identification questions,there may be a potential priming effect.Thus,future studies can use distractor activities between the two tests to avoid this possible priming effect.